At a die-in at Grand Central Station in New York City, a protestor wanted people to remember Spike Lee’s movie, and the scene in which a cop choked to death Radio Raheem.
Photograph: John Minchillo/AP

Die-ins – protests in which participants lie in public areas to mime death –are effective not just because they are acts of theatre that identify with the dead, but because they are visible expressions of fear by people who believe they might be the next to die. And they have roots deeper than the protest ingenuity that has defined so much of 2014.

Across the US and the UK and beyond, thousands of young people are halting street traffic, shutting down shopping malls and disrupting other people’s lives to “die-in” for racial justice. Convened largely by black youth activists, well-attended marches against police violence in dozens of US cities are convincing displays of growing dissent – but the related acts of urgent public mourning are tools of moral indictment, not just protest. Activists are staging their own deaths because speaking out against systemic racism no longer feels like enough.

Protestors held a die-in at Harvard Square. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

As Shawn Torres, a Union Theological Seminary graduate student recently stated, “We’re protesting because we don’t even have the option to do what we want to do in our own bodies and in our skin.”

Though the current wave of die-ins began after grand juries in Ferguson and New York City refused to indict the cops who used lethal force against Michael Brown and Eric Garner, they tap into a deep well of what professor Salamishah Tillet calls “civic estrangement” from a state that ignores excessive police violence against black and brown people.

The latest die-ins are some of the first to garner national attention since environmental activists in the 1970s donned Cold War-era gas masks on Earth Day and conducted die-ins to protest polluted air, or Aids activists – especially from Act-Up – staged die-ins and political funerals to protest the government’s failure to act to study or prevent the mass deaths of mostly gay men from Aids in the 1980s and 90s. In the latter case, predominantly gay and lesbian protesters targeted places like Wall Street, the Food and Drug Administration and the White House with calls of “Silence=Death”, calling attention to the fact that the government’s willingness to ignore a public health crisis functioned as a death sentence for those without available treatment – and they worked with allies to eventually make Aids a mainstream social cause.

Lawyers, law students and legal staff held a die-in during a rainstorm in Los Angeles, California Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

The current die-ins are part of a movement to end police brutality against and the mass incarceration of black and brown people, and have drawn allies from different races, generations and faiths. When non-black participants join black people in die-ins, they affirm the need for institutional change – but they also visibly highlight the remaining disparities facing black and brown people.

In order to put those disparities on display to spectators, at several die-ins – including at the college where I teach – black organizers stated that white and non-black students of color were encouraged to join, but should sit rather than lay on the pavement, to demonstrate that black people are often punished more, hurt more and killed more than their non-black counterparts in police interactions. Their presence was designed by organizers to underscore how non-blackyouth are often witnesses to, and not victims of, black people’s suffering.

We’ve seen that before, too: civil rights era sit-ins and freedom rides with multiracial participants drew the fierce ire of authorities alike, but black protesters were far more likely to be targeted with harsh jail sentences and violent pushback. In putting their bodies on the line, white allies, too, took great risk but acknowledged their protected status.

If die-ins can achieve interracial solidarity without slouching toward colorblindness – the idea that, by ignoring one another’s individual racial differences, we can end institutionalized racism and discrimination – the protestors can together embody a bitter truth: that it is a luxury to avoid the legal insecurity, terror or death routinely experienced by African Americans in this country. Activist coalitions on the left are finally emerging that seem to value the vibrant differences of race, sexuality, gender, class and citizenship while seeking out ways to address the structural obstacles that prevail.

Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, in the spot where her father died during a die-in. Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

Youth activists – like Eric Garner’s daughter, Erica, who staged a die-in at the exact spot where her father was killed, the women who started #BlackLivesMatter, and many others – are bravely acting out their existential fears in public: that they could be next, and that respectability politics are not a shield from systemic racism or racially motivated police brutality. They are asking us all to bear witness and participate in rituals of grief, and to replace common apathy with collective responsibility.